aBy the time of 2005's Devils & Dust, Bruce Springsteen was solidly back on (or at least near the) top. His seventh #1 album, a solo album sorta kinda fitting into a trilogy with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad almost, it was something of a grab bag of songs, with many of them going back a decade or more. Some of them were brilliant (the title track, "Reno," the "Rosalita" sequel "Long Time Comin'"), some were...not, even if well-intentioned ("Black Cowboys," "Silver Palomino") and some were simply enjoyable if surprisingly lightweight love songs ("Leah," "Maria's Bed," "All the Way Home," "All I'm Thinkin' About"). The album shared Tom Joad's exploration of the southwestern area of the United States, as well presaging his next LP's meditation on the Iraq War, while also continuing Springsteen's obsession with familial bonds and religion. Kind of a lot for a hodgepodge of old and new songs, all of which were newly recorded with producer Brendan O'Brien.
"Matamoros Banks," the LP's closing song, is one of the album's strongest, and one of Springsteen's sweetest—albeit of a decidedly bittersweet nature—since his commercial revival. An admitted sequel of sorts to Tom Joad's "Across the Border"—itself a tribute to Ry Cooder's "Across the Borderline"—it bookends the opening title track with its ambiguity, religious questions and focus on death and love, but with a markedly more upbeat tone (if not tempo). Given that the song opens with the narrator's dead body being eaten by wild animals, this is no mean feat.
For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound
Opening with the flat assertion that the river holds you down is probably not meant as an in-joke, per se, but when dealing with a writer of Springsteen's nature and calibre, it's unlikely it wouldn't have occurred to him. But more than that, it's an upending of the more common view of a river in literature, which is as a giver of life, and bringer of civilization. Meanwhile, the second half of the sentence will come to assume more significance a little later on.
Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes so they lay open to the stars
These lines are a remarkable study in contrast, with the pleasant, youthful connotation of the playgrounds immediately juxtaposed against the derelict train yards. But the next sentence ups the ante considerably, as the corpse's eyelids are eaten by animals, allowing them to view the stars without obstruction. The first line is delightful and grim in one sentence, but the second half of the couplet combines brutality and effulgence. Such a horrible thing, and yet here it's portrayed as almost a boon. Sure, you were eaten by eaten by wild animals. granted. but in a glass half-full kind of way, they were, you know, kinda cute wild animals. and hey! now you can see the stars all the time—isn't that nice? look, I'm not going to come right out and say you're better off this way...but... And, amazingly, it's not presented with any sort of ironic tone.
Your clothes give way to the current and river stone
'Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
And the things of the earth they make their claim
That the things of heaven may do the same
Again with the contrasting imagines of water and stone, heaven and earth, leading to an interesting assertion, that clothes are evidence of who you were—an echo of the well-known phrase "the clothes make the man," a saying that goes back at least as far as Mark Twain—setting up and in some ways seemingly refuting the earth/heaven balancing of the next couplet, while that couplet at the same time echoes the belief that only by giving up one's earthly possessions can one enter the kingdom of heaven.
That's the opening verse—a corpse, desecrated by animals, bobs to the surface of the water in which the singer died, and it leads to the chorus, simpler than the plainest hymn:
Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanks
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Fascinating and instantly arresting as the opening verse is, the second verse ups the emotional ante by taking a step backwards in time, to when the narrator was just starting out on his journey.
Over rivers of stone and ancient ocean beds
I walk on sandals of twine and tire tread
My pockets full of dust, my mouth filled with cool stone
The pale moon opens the earth to its bones
That Springsteen so liberally uses such elemental images—river, stone, ocean bed, dust, moon, bone—is not accidental. He is breaking things down to their most essential essences, performing an autopsy of sorts on not the man this verse but the man's journey, and even the planet itself over which he's making his trek.
We immediately get a sense of who this man is and what he's doing. That he's attempting to cross over the Rio Grande is obvious, but his footwear—sandals either made of recycled tires, held together with twine, or at least repaired with those materials the best he can—leaves no doubt as to his station, nor any question as to whether or not he's got calves the size of cantaloupes, as some unhinged, hateful, reprehensible specimens would gleefully imagine. His pockets are full of dust and on his feet are the same garments worn by Jesus, and the odds that that's a coincidence are virtually nil. The narrator is, if not literally Christ, certainly one of followers, both metaphorically and literally, making a journey not unlike that described in the bible.
The interconnectedness of the writing in this song is exquisite, as the final line of the verse ties in, once again, to the heavens/earth dichotomy first introduced in the opening verse, even as the first line continues the river imagery, albeit in this case long dried up.
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
The touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Then we get the third verse, and we move forward in time again, albeit not quite as far as the first verse.
Your sweet memory comes on the evenin' wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again
The lights of Brownsville, across the river shine
A shout rings out and into the silty red river I dive
The man is exhausted, thirsty, after making this long, arduous, dangerous journey...and yet he's able to keep moving thanks to the dreams of his beloved; so deeply in love is he that even the wind carries her memory to him. Across the river, he can view that long cherishd Springsteen staple, the promised land: and true to form, he can see it in the distance, but he cannot quite get there. In fact, he doesn't entirely plan on making it all the way there, at least not alone: he's urgerly her to meet him on the Matamoros banks, the southern side of the river—a river which is already red, even before it's further stained with his blood, as it's soon to be—so they can cross over together...or perhaps because he plans to return to her, and his home, for good. Or perhaps because he knows that he cannot make it to the promised land alone, that without her, it cannot possibly be the promised land.
The religious symbolism is the song is nearly unmissable, even if you're not aware of just how often Springsteen has peppered his songs with biblical allusions. But it's chilling to get to the end of this lovely, gentle song and see how it was all set up in the opening couplet, as he rises to the light—both literal and metaphorical.
The structure is fascinating in that Springsteen doesn't just tell the story in reverse. Instead, he jumps around in time. He starts at the end—or arguably a bit past the ending—then goes back to the beginning, and then jumps forward again, but not quite all the way to the end, instead filling in the middle bit. The only other song I can think of that jumps around in time like this Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," although in that masterpiece the timeline is even more jumbled, so it can be difficult to tell just where you are in the story—or even in time—at any given point of the song. Here there's no such ambiguity. The man is dead at the beginning, and then we go back and see what led up to his death.
But what that is is both clear-cut and ambiguous. It's his dive into the river, as he attempts to escape. But as Springsteen himself put it, when introducing the song on the Devils & Dust tour:
"a man makes the same journey and is fuelled by the same hopes and love for his partner and his family, his children, in search of something a little bit better."
His death is brought about by hope and his love for his partner and family, his children, for the deep-seated need to give them a better life. How beautiful and terrible.
It's all on a musical bed which is an incredibly simple harmonic structure—just the same I-IV-V chords Springsteen has used in dozens and dozens of his songs, including many of his very best, but with the lovely touch of subtle Mexican coloring in the actual guitar playing.
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
A touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
This album closer could not be further from The Rising's gospel closer. And yet at the same time it feels like its twin brother from a different mother, one who was born on just the other side of the border. The now empty vessel which had once been a man may no longer make a sound, but Springsteen is here to still give him voice.
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